WHO JOINS CULTS?
I believe it’s not so much the kind of person as the situation a person finds himself or herself in that defines who joins cults. People one would not expect to be vulnerable become susceptible if the circumstances are conducive to making them vulnerable, and we may suddenly, in times of great stress, become much more vulnerable without realizing it.
What Kinds of People Become Followers—or Who Joins Cults?
The potential cult leader, so often self-deluded, is also often a frustrated cheater and a practiced deceiver–deluding himself or herself that he or she is no such thing. Not infrequently such a person may be found in some sense sulking by himself, looking for his main chance. But when he (or she) finally has found a way, an opening, and has attracted a few followers, then a hidden potential is realized. He’s awakened, as it were, and all his talents are brought to the fore. But how does he (or she) get such followers? It’s via a set of skills–by means of flattery, the use of imagination, persuasion, deception and manipulation.
The first few followers are the key. The fact is that the leader can’t get more people to follow him all by himself, as surprising as that may seem; he needs the very first followers to help him. The strange truth is that the role of the follower in creating the circumstances in which cult leaders thrive is not to be underestimated. Certain people at certain times in their lives are almost asking for the kind of deliverer the cult leader promises to be. Once the cult leader attracts a few such followers, they in turn become the attraction which draws more to the flame. The followers enable the leader; their commitment to him is essential to making it all happen. This was certainly the case with the Children of God, the cult with which I had extensive personal experience.
The thoughtful Eric Hoffer in his insightful little book, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, wrote of the role followers play in mass movements, and it’s plain from his description of such movements that in his description he has also captured the role of the follower in the cult. Replacing Hoffer’s term, “mass movement” with the term “cult” in the quotation below will reveal how relevant his ideas are to understanding who joins cults and how cult members are related to cult leaders:
“No matter how vital we think the role of leadership in the rise of a mass movement [or the cult], there is no doubt that the leader cannot create the conditions which make the rise of the mass movement [cult] possible. He cannot conjure a movement out of the void. There has to be an eagerness to follow and obey, and an intense dissatisfaction with things as they are before movement and leader can make their appearance. When conditions are not ripe, the potential leader, no matter how gifted, and his holy cause, no matter how potent, remains without a following….There is a period of waiting in the wings—often a very long period—for all the great leaders whose entrance on the scene seems to us a most crucial point in the course of a mass movement [or cult].”[1]
A study of the time and the circumstances surrounding the rise of the Children of God and of its founder and leader, David Berg—“Mo” or “Moses David”—shows the accuracy of Hoffer’s analysis. Mo, frustrated, waited for a long time—but his time finally came in the late 1960s when circumstances were ripe. The followers he attracted at the outset readily invited him to take charge. Here again is how Hoffer explains things:
“The leader personifies the certitude of the creed and the defiance and grandeur of power. He articulates and justifies the resentment dammed up in the souls of the frustrated. He kindles the vision of a breathtaking future so as to justify the sacrifice of a transitory present….He evokes the enthusiasm of communion—the sense of liberation from a petty and meaningless individual existence.”[2]
I think Hoffer here touches on a widespread attitude among those who join mass movements or cults. For a cult to exist, there needs to be a leader ready, willing and able to take such power, but the readiness of followers to submit “sets them up.” One should keep an eye out for the “true believer” impulse in followers; it’s as necessary for a cult’s existence as the authoritarian impulse is in the leader and such an impulse is yet another sign of the cult.
However, I do not say that Hoffer’s insight describes completely the kind of person who joins a cult. What he has to say is true—frustration and desire for a more meaningful life does characterize followers—but there’s still more to it. So how else might one describe the readiness in some to become cult members?
I begin by mentioning the psychologist Erik Erikson (1902-1994), a professor of human development and lecturer on psychiatry at Harvard, who in Boston in the 1930s became the first child psychoanalyst. Erikson developed a theory of human psychological development from which came the notion we have all heard of, “the identity crisis.” His ideas—and this one in particular—are relevant if we want to understand further why people join cults and who such people are who join them. Erikson gives us insight into the vulnerability cults invariably seek to exploit.
The notion of the “identity crisis” was part of his broader idea of human “life-stages.” In Erikson’s view human beings normally go through some eight stages of development between infancy through late adulthood. He describes there being a crisis at each stage which requires resolution. If we manage successfully to negotiate the challenges of each of these crises we become healthy human beings in a psychological and social sense, but failure to manage any of these transitions results in an unhealthy sense of inadequacy. He theorized as part of this picture that there’s a tension in the lives of children as they grow older and seek to form their own identity apart from that of being a child of their parents. To form this mature identity, he reasoned, they must break away, separating from parents and the parents’ world.
Erikson’s theory is easily appropriated as one way—and a powerfully explanatory way—to understand the appeal of cults. Indeed, Erikson himself influenced Robert J. Lifton, who is the father of the relatively new field of cult studies.
Young people might use these groups—such as the one I met and joined—as a means of getting out on their own and standing on their own feet—a means of leaving one stage of development and moving to the next. If, as Erikson would say, one wants to become a man or woman who has established one’s own identity, could not the cults play on that, offering a lateral move, so to speak, to help relieve a young person suffering an “identity crisis?”
The identity crisis involved in moving from youth to adulthood can certainly be a painful thing. It’s a “vertical” separating from parents, growing up and out, leaving one’s parents to become one’s own person. If one joins a cult, however, one can leave parents behind, but do so without really solving the “identity crisis” which is only fully resolved by becoming your own person. In a cult, instead of really growing up, one finds a new way to be dependent. We might theorize, then, that a person may join a group such as the Children of God in part to make this step away from parents but in doing so really not making a step towards growing up.
The work of men like Erikson—and later of cult studies expert Robert J. Lifton—indicates that being independent of Mom and Dad but then making oneself a child again, with the cult taking on the role of parent, is hardly the way to resolve this matter of the identity crisis, and managing the important step of becoming a mature human being independent of parents. The cult steps in, but the identity crisis is not resolved.
Eric Hoffer’s “true believer” also explains some of the appeal of cults, and Erikson provides a further persuasive theory for us if we are seeking to show who is most susceptible to the appeal of cults. Between these two views, then—Erikson’s and Hoffer’s—have we now fully portrayed the kinds of people who join cults? Or are there still more ways to determine or explain who joins?
I will speak of my own experience. These psychological yearnings Erikson gives us are real; we are vulnerable to appeals that tell us, “Here’s a family for you, here you’ll belong, here you’ll be loved—join us!” The cult wants people to feel so beloved that they’ll stay and receive fuller instruction—and so become the sort of “true believers” Hoffer speaks of, as well.
In the Children of God I did find something that was very like a family and, what’s more, I was in love with what I found. I don’t think this was the main reason I joined, but it was a factor. As my wife told me once in conversation about those early years in the cult, “You were in love. Nothing anyone said would have dissuaded you, once you’d joined.” I think she was right.
Thus when my pastor, when my parents, when my old high school friends, when a couple of the men from my church, came out in four successive “waves” to our camp a few weeks after I’d joined and tried to talk to me about what I was doing—fearing for me, thinking that the group was somehow not what it seemed and was not going to do me good—I couldn’t hear them at all. I was in love and telling me that what I’d fallen in love with was ugly, or dishonest, or exploiting me, or somehow at fault, was not going to change my mind. Such passion as I had for the group prevented me from having anything like clear vison.
Joe Wall, the pastor of the church to which I belonged when I met the Children of God and who had been instrumental in leading me to faith in Jesus Christ several months before I met the group didn’t realize what he was up against when he came out to our camp to talk to me soon after I had joined. He didn’t realize that it was now too late to turn me away from them. Once he’d parked his car and gotten out, identifying himself as my pastor, the group’s leaders surrounded him and berated him, blaming him for all the faults of the American church when he’d only come to talk to me for a few minutes; this was before I even knew he’d come. I was eventually told he had come and came over with some of the “older” brothers to see him.
I was unwilling to say much at all to Pastor Wall, surrounded as we were by the leaders of the group, nor was I willing to talk to him in private. He finally drove back to Houston, seeing I was lost to him. Cults were on nobody’s radar in late 1969—but they soon would be. They were certainly now on Pastor Joe Wall’s radar as he drove back to Houston from our campsite on that cold December day over fifty years ago.
During four months between when I turned to Christ and joined his church, and when I met and joined the C.O.G. Joe had spent time with me, taking me to an evangelism conference in Houston, writing me a long letter about my salvation, sitting down with me several times to talk. He had asked a young couple in our church to look after me while he was in India on a missionary trip for several weeks that fall. While Pastor Wall was away in India this kindly couple invited me to their home for lunch one Sunday, but they were unaware of the presence of the danger when they took me out afterwards to visit some “hippie” Christians they’d learned were camped in the not-so-distant Bear Creek County Park. They’d read about them in the newspaper and, innocently thinking they could bring blankets and toys to the group camped out there with their children, thought it would be interesting to visit. They had no idea I would be so utterly charmed by the group, and that I’d join the very next day; they didn’t know that this was the fledgling Children of God and that the group’s leader, parked apart from the campsite in his mobile home some miles away, was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, the founder of what would soon be called a cult.
So, who joins cults? We might begin by saying that such people—such as I was—are naïve, needy and hungry for something, and who are fairly easily deceived. They may be ready to become what Hoffer calls “a true believer,” or they may be experiencing an identity crisis from which they are seeking relief. They may be ready to “fall in love” with a teaching or a group or a person charmingly promising them great satisfaction, real purpose and true happiness, at last. That’s the appeal, that’s the allure.
As soon as I joined I was put into a course of instruction consisting of long daily doses of the group’s doctrines through Bible study designed to confirm these things. An intensive program of Bible memorization was begun, too. People were around me, checking up on me and encouraging me constantly. I was being prepared—as vulnerable as I was—to stand against anyone who might try to take me away. There was nothing in Pastor Wall’s church to compare with the urgency or intensity which I encountered in the group I had joined. Present in the group was an awareness that unless a new member was taught quickly and well, they’d become more susceptible to critical arguments and so be tempted to leave.
This conviction about the need to quickly, engagingly arm new believers was absent in almost all the churches—or, if it was there, it was more theoretical than realized. They didn’t seem to know that those just recently come to faith as well as the young brought up in their midst, needed to be fed and tended intensely, lest a wolf or some other sort of seduction come along. But at the time—1969—so many people in American churches didn’t realize the extent to which wolves had come into the country and that they would soon pose threats to new and young American Christians.
In any case, I was the one who decided to join the group that later was revealed to be a cult, and I am the one responsible for that decision. Pastor Wall and others tried to rescue me, but neither he nor they were able to do so; I didn’t want to be rescued. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, few were aware of how vulnerable young people like me were to the appeal of cults. There’s more awareness now, but one fears these things are not warned of enough.
But now, even in light of what has been said already, I must add that I believe it’s not so much the kind of person as the situation a person finds himself or herself in that defines who joins cults. People one would not expect to be vulnerable become susceptible if the circumstances are conducive to making them vulnerable, and we are may suddenly become much more vulnerable than we often realize.
When someone’s circumstances incline them to be susceptible to the allure of a cult they then are vulnerable. It could be a time in someone’s life when they are discouraged, alienated, or isolated, when they feel unappreciated, are looking for a new life, a new role, a way to be a hero, a way to be dedicated, a way to make a difference, a way to be important or a way to escape an immediately unpleasant reality.
I would say that a wider variety of kinds of people join cults than are described by Hoffer and Erikson—even while I believe Hoffer and Erikson are quite right in their theories. When someone’s circumstances incline them to be susceptible to the allure of a cult they then are vulnerable. It could be a time in someone’s life when they are discouraged, alienated, or isolated, when they feel unappreciated, are looking for a new life, a new role, a way to be a hero, a way to be dedicated, a way to make a difference, a way to be important or a way to escape an immediately unpleasant reality. This may not be a permanent state of mind in those who join, but if their meeting a cult coincides with a period in their lives when they are looking for a “sense of liberation from a petty and meaningless individual existence,” as Hoffer puts it in The True Believer, when they are overwhelmed and enticed by the promise of a loving and caring community, when they are feeling, even if it’s just for a season, unloved and uncared-for, or are looking for a way to escape heavy burdens of some kind, then it’s not so hard for them to be enticed into putting down their guard. Once “the bottom has fallen out” through the kinds of circumstances described here, a person may become exceptionally vulnerable to a cult’s allure.
Back in the 1960s and 70s there were very many such susceptible young people—in their twenties, typically. But interestingly, people joining cults after the 1980s and into the new century have tended to include older individuals who have suffered a set-back of some kind, perhaps repeatedly. Margaret Singer, a scholar in the field of cult studies, has observed the increased breadth today in terms of age and background of those who are susceptible to the appeal of cults:
“Cults are no longer solely a concern for parents who observe their idealistic, and in some cases disaffected, young adult children being recruited, as was the case in the 1960s and 1970s. For in the 1980s and 1990s, we have seen cults seduce people of all ages, all income brackets. In the past, cults gained a foothold by attracting the so-called marginal people—the unaffiliated, the disenchanted, the disgruntled of each generation. But today’s cultic groups have so professionalized their approaches and techniques of persuasion that they are moving well beyond the fringe and into the mainstream. They want you.” [3]
Are the forty-year-olds of today cases of arrested development? Are they people who have never grown up and thus are now functioning in the same way a younger cohort did four decades ago? Has the undermining of traditional parenting, traditional families and traditional religious institutions, and the failure to find a new source of security through schooling, job or family among the rising generations, rendered today’s thirty-somethings and even forty-somethings possessors of the same vulnerabilities as were found in those who were in their late teens and very early twenties a generation ago? Do cults appeal to those of any age who have “failed to launch,” as the saying goes? Yes, we may answer to all these questions; these factors also certainly explain something significant regarding those who find their way into such settings. Taken all together, these views from Erikson and Hoffer—and from Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (finding authoritarianism appealing and freedom frightening), make up the psychological and sociological approach to understanding the phenomenon of cult membership.
But, in spite of what has been said here about the work of such thinkers as these—social scientists, for the most part—cult membership and the appeal of cults are not only to be understood in psychological or sociological terms. Could it be that young adults in modern Western nations had reached a point by the late 1960s—and little has changed in this respect since then—at which the received answers to the big questions of life bequeathed to them by their parents were seen as empty, hollow, insubstantial, or hypocritical, because they actually were these things?
Maybe a greater truth—one that the social sciences of psychology and sociology couldn’t then and can’t now comprehend very well—is that an increasingly secular and materialistic worldview, operating on the dwindling capital of a former age, is completely unable to provide satisfactory explanations about the meaning of life. Thus young people—and some not so young people in more recent decades—in these cultures may be justifiably upset by the widespread disposition in developed modern cultures that regards human existence as vaguely without purpose.
Photo courtesy of Andrew Neel, Unsplash
Could we say there was a lack in people’s lives of something we could call spiritual or transcendent, so that the problem bothering young men and women goes beyond social alienation, identity crises and a need to just “grow up?” They might not have interpreted their situation as one of lostness or seen it as one that could be theologically defined as a spiritual need or a searching for the transcendent, but was this not still quite possibly the case?
If modern western culture was starved for the spiritual or, to use another term, for a theological understanding of existence, or for “the transcendent,” and cults came along, claiming to provide access to these, could not this, too, be a factor which helps us explain why people join them? There’s a widely recognized understanding that there’s a religious component in the make-up of human beings and if it is not satisfied, there then exists a vacuum needing to be filled. If this is the case, then people will seek to fill it with something and into this need or vacuum have stepped the cults.
If there is something we can call spiritual in the make-up of human beings—though modern children of the Enlightenment would deny there is, allowing materialistic, psychological and sociological understandings of human nature wholly to absorb any notion that smacks of the theological, of religion—would it be a surprise that a hunger for this slighted spiritual dimension would spur unhappy young people to go looking for ways to satisfy it?
Though I cared very much for my parents, who had done what they could to provide me with a good home growing up, they did not provide me with a meaningful, coherent, overarching understanding about life’s purposes, and so I was looking for something more while I also felt alienated from the pervasive absence of such things that characterized my parents’ generation. My response was eventually to drop out of Brown University at the age of 19 and join the Houston Carpenters’ Union’s Apprentice Program, only then to drop out of that seven months later to join the Children of God. These were inclinations and actions that could be well understood in terms of the thinking of such men as Hoffer, Fromm and Erikson as described above.
But in my case—and I was hardly alone—though these social-science ways of explaining behavior were certainly valid, it was ultimately a spiritual hunger to satisfy these deepest of desires for meaning that moved me most of all to join when I met the group, which I only much later realized was a cult. When I first saw them they appeared to be a band of Christian hippies living communally, arguing that forsaking everything to follow Jesus was the best way to live, prompting me to think, “This is what I’m looking for!”
I learned—though it took nearly a decade—that joining the Children of God was not a real solution; it could not finally satisfy the needs and desires of my heart. All who join cults do so, I believe, when they are particularly vulnerable; they may do so for any or all of the reasons listed here. But for whatever reason they join, though it may take a long time for someone who joins to see this, the cults can never deliver on their promises and all who join them cannot help being finally disappointed, even while some still cannot find a way to escape.
[1] Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: Harper and Row, 1951) p. 113. The bracketed terms have been added.
[2] The True Believer, p. 114
[3] Margaret Thaler Singer, Cults in Our Midst: The Continuing Fight Against Their Hidden Menace, with Foreword by Robert J. Lifton (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003), pp. 5-6.
